The national lottery is 20 years old today. Since 1994 it has given away over £53 billion in prizes and created more than 3,700 millionaires. Many more people have played.

Each time you play the lottery you have a one in 14 million chance of winning the jackpot by matching all six numbers. Some people are superstitious about the numbers they use, or spend hours trying to figure out which numbers to play.

What numbers have come up the most often?

The balls have fallen out many different ways in the last twenty years. This chart shows which numbers have come out the most frequently, according to National Lottery statistics.

23 has come up the most, and 20 the least.

But no numbers are lucky

Just because 23 has come up the most frequently in the last few years, doesn't mean it will come up again for another fortnight, or a month, or a year. And 20 could come up five times in a row.

Every time the balls are drawn there is an equal chance of a particular number being drawn . The fact that you played a certain number last week or yesterday makes no difference to what balls come out of the machine.

In normal life, each number has an equal chance of being drawn. Each lottery ticket has a one in 57 chance of matching three numbers.

TRUTH: The numbers are drawn at random and playing the same numbers makes no difference

And playing every day does NOT increase your chance of winning

Again, wrong. In strict statistical terms, if you played to infinity then yes, you would definitely win at least once .

There are only 6 balls drawn each day, and each day they are taken out of the same set of 49 balls. The chances of you winning on any day are exactly the same as the last .

What DOES increase your chances of winning slightly is paying for multiple tickets on the same day , because you've then got more combinations of numbers. But the chances of the second or third row winning is exactly the same as the first.

TRUTH: Playing every day makes no difference to the numbers as they're entirely random